The Haunter of the Dark: a first impressions review

The Haunter of the Dark is Paul Baldowski’s guide to writing Cthulhu Hack investigations using Lovecraft’s story of the same name as an example.

Physically, the book is a lovely 76-page A5 book that feels like the right size for a roleplaying supplement. While written for Cthulhu Hack, the ideas and process for creating an investigation work for any investigative game. (This is the only Cthulhu Hack book I own, so I can’t tell if other adventures also use this advice.)

The Haunter of the Dark is split into four parts: Hacking at the Darkness, Horrible Abysses, Random Tables, and The Haunter of the Dark.

Hacking at the Darkness

This is the book’s introduction and explains the basic principle, which is to take a story and create an investigation around it. Hacking at the Darkness explains the basic Cthulhu Hack investigation structure:

Fascination: Hooks that lead the PCs into the investigation.

Discovery: Uncovering clues and working out what’s really going on.

Conflict: Conflict isn’t only fighting – it includes reaching hard-to-find places, or tracking down clues. It happens in parallel with Discovery.

Resolution: The final scene, where the investigation is resolved. 

Coda: The last bit of the story – a moment to reflect. (Sadly, this isn’t expanded on in the book, but I’ve found getting the players to describe what their characters are doing in an “end of credits scene” is a good way to capture the spirit of a coda.)

The introduction also covers annotating the original text of your source material. The book uses different colours of highlighter to differentiate the different types of annotation:

• Information – revealed by a Flashlight roll
• Stories – revealed by a Smokes roll
• Threats
• Unsettling imagery to repurpose
• Background and motivation
• Seeds and hooks

Horrible Abysses

Horrible Abysses, is the meat of the book. This is a sample (outline?) investigation that follows the events in The Haunter of the Dark. The hook is that Robert Blake has been found dead (as per Lovecraft’s story), and the investigators are investigating.

So Horrible Abysses takes the structure above, details various locations and shows how you might add clues that lead to a resolution where the investigators face the Haunter!

Locations include Blake’s apartment, Federal Hill, the Providence Journal, the police station, the library, city hall – and, of course, the sinister church where Blake found the Shining Trapezohedron.  The resolution, however, happens elsewhere – the Haunter has moved.

As for the Haunter itself, Lovecraft doesn’t say, and five entities are suggested: an avatar of Azathoth, insects from the void, a proto-shoggoth, an avatar of Shub-Niggurath, or a Mi-Go weapon. 

Unfortunately, the investigation doesn’t feel easy to run. (I’ve only read it, I’ve not tried to run it.) While it’s a great example of the thought processes that you might use when creating an investigation based on a story, I would need to do a fair bit of work to bring it to the table.

Random tables

Following Horrible Abysses are eight pages of random tables – contents of a desk drawer, things found halfway up a staircase, newspaper names. 

These feel a little unnecessary. There are some lovely entries in the tables, such as “Oddly arranged formula set down in soft pencil: won’t add up,” or “Ring with a dozen keys, all snapped off bar one.”). But for me, they would be better in an investigation so they can be rolled at the appropriate time.

The Haunter of the Dark

This section reprints Lovecraft’s The Haunter of the Dark, highlighted and annotated to indicate gameable sections.

The Haunter of the Dark, annotated

As I hadn’t read The Haunter of the Dark in about 30 years, I was pleased to read it again.

Overall

I do like seeing how someone might use a short story to create an investigation. It’s not quite how I would do it, but that’s ok. (I am more likely to take the broad strokes of the story and transplant them somewhere else – but I already know how to do that!)

It’s interesting to compare this with Graham Walmsley’s Stealing Cthulhu. The two work well together, as while Stealing Cthulhu takes a big-picture look at adapting Lovecraft’s work for gaming, The Haunter of the Dark takes a more detailed look at a specific investigation.

However, the one thing that I felt is missing is a final investigation that a Keeper can run with minimal fuss. In my mind, Horrible Abysses is too much of a proto-scenario; a fair bit of work is needed to get it to the table. I would have liked to have seen a final, tightly written investigation stripped of the discussion and options. To keep to the existing page count, this could replace the random tables.

So that’s The Haunter of the Dark. A lovely look at how you might adapt a story into an investigation.